Bihar girl having affair with neighbourhood boy, strangled to death for family ‘honour’

Priti Kumari, 20, daughter of Ravindra Singh alias Daya Singh of Mahaddiganj locality of Sasaram (Bihar), about 153 km south west of Patna, died in mysterious circumstances on November 8.

indiaUpdated: Nov 12, 2017 19:18 IST

Prasun K Mishra Hindustan Times, Sasaram

(Representative image PTI)

Enraged with her ‘affair’ with a neighbourhood boy, a man in south western Bihar district headquarters town of Sasaram allegedly killed his daughter for the sake of his family’s ‘honour’. He has been arrested and ‘confessed’ to the crime during interrogation by the police.

Priti Kumari, 20, daughter of Ravindra Singh alias Daya Singh of Mahaddiganj locality of Sasaram, district headquarters of Rohtas, located about 153 km south west to state capital, Patna, died in mysterious circumstances on November 8.

The boy, an intermediate student, remains traceless and his father has registered a ‘missing person’ case in this connection. It is suspected that he, too, may have been killed.

Earlier, her neighbor Chandan Kumar, 19, son of a teacher and an intermediate student, who was allegedly in love with Priti, went missing on September 19 afternoon.

The police were zeroing in on the girl’s family when the body of a youth was found hanging from a tree adjacent to Gita Ghat Ashram near Kaimur hills, some 15 days back. However, the body was such in a decomposed state that family members of the missing boy could not identify it as his.

The body was disposed of as per the rules for disposal of unidentified bodies.

Mobile call records of Priti and Chandan, accessed by the police, showed the two were in contact even on the day on which Chandan went missing. The girl had failed in intermediate examination and her wedding was fixed by her father for next summer.

The information led police to investigate the girl’s family members’ role in the boy’s disappearance.

When the girl died on November 8, her father told police that she had committed suicide by setting her clothes on fire. But the police suspected foul play in her death when her post mortem examination indicated death by strangulation. It showed burns on her body occurred after her death.

Thereafter, the girl’s father was taken in to custody, on Saturday, and confessed that he had killed the girl. He had even forced the girl to write a suicide note blaming therein the police for harassing her and her family since Chandan went missing. The idea was to push the police on back foot.

Post-midnight on November 7 (technically on November 8), the father strangulated the girl to death with the help of other family members and set her clothes on fire the morning, before informing the police”, said Sasaram sub-divisional officer Alok Ranjan.

The police had yet to recover the suicide note, Ranjan said.

“We will apply to the court court on Monday for securing its permission to exhume the unidentified body and hold a DNA test of bones to identify it and ascertain whether or not it is Chandan’s body”, Ranjan added.

The police fear the girl’s family may have killed Chandan to avoid any problem during Priti’s forthcoming wedding. “The girl was killed probably because she threatened to disclose the murder of her lover”, said a police officer.